The National Assembly of Wales (the Senedd) is launching the latest phase in its e-democracy initiative to encourage citizens to engage with the democratic process, allowing thousands of visitors to view content simultaneously at www.senedd.tv.

It’s getting there with Digital Rapids StreamZ encoders, now with one in the main Senedd chamber plus one in each of the three committee rooms.

Another encoder has been purchased for a proposed fourth committee room, expected to be operational in time for the start of the Autumn term in September 2009.

The StreamZ encoders are used for live streaming and to capture archived meetings from tape. One audio channel captures the meeting while the second channel offers English translation when the spoken language is Welsh. Taking advantage of StreamZ's capability to automatically FTP files once capture has ended, archived clips of all recorded meetings are available to visitors of senedd.tv just a few minutes after the end of sessions.?

Barcud Derwen, the United Kingdom's largest broadcast service provider outside of London, is responsible for delivering the broadcast infrastructure within the Welsh Assembly and will run the streaming application to provide an average of 35 hours of content per week. ?

Members of the public and Assembly staff now have unrestricted access to plenary sessions and committee meetings, together with a searchable archive to allow viewers to search for specific content and view it on demand. StreamZ's ability to automatically generate unique filenames based on metadata variables for all clips created from each encoder makes it convenient for the back-end database to link correctly to each asset and select relevant language options.?

"We've been the host broadcaster for the National Assembly of Wales since 1999 and see huge potential in extending our service to a new audience via the Internet,” said Rhun Roberts of Barcud Derwen. “I had no hesitation in choosing Digital Rapids' StreamZ systems as the live and transcode encoders for senedd.tv, and we have had 100 percent reliability from them.”

The IPTV solution enables real-time information-sharing and collaboration between Guard personnel in the field and those on base during emergency events, as well as for exercises and routine operations.